


Against Astronomical Odds

by sanguinarysucrose



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Los Santos, M/M, Organized Crime, Origin Story, POV First Person, gta v - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-07 17:48:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14676261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinarysucrose/pseuds/sanguinarysucrose
Summary: Trevor Collins is dissatisfied with how his academic pursuits only seem to provide more and more debt with little significant pay off. However, two of his closest friends seem to be thriving without any college education as valuable members of The Fakes. With their help, and a bit of cheeky mind games, Trevor seeks to end his civilian innocence and join the gang that owns Los Santos.





	1. Chapter 1

     Nights in Los Santos always felt so revolutionary.  From the moment the sun descended past the treelines, slid a mess of wind whipped hair down onto the pillows of shrubbery; one could feel imminent change. And from the moment luminescent solar eyes drowsily fluttered closed, the moment the rest of its majestic form descended upon the curvature of the land; I knew it was time. Time, for every heathen hedonist and heretic to crawl out from the depths of whatever ordinary life they feigned. A revolution that began subtle and quiet, but could rage into an inferno at any moment.

     I had the perfect view of tonight’s transition, from the roof of  a warehouse I had no business being on. I watched as neon signs, fluorescent billboards and street lights popcorned into illumination until the whole city seemed to come alive all over again. It was almost mesmerizing, as the bustle of the night grew to replace its dawn counterpart. Enough so, that the vibration of my phone startled me.

     ‘Sorry. Running late! See u in a bit!’ Oh, right. That’s why I was out here at a warehouse in the first place.

     ‘I’m not going anywhere, tyt Matt!’  

     I couldn’t help but chuckle at how cordial Matt was for someone inviting me into the dark inner workings of this city. It all seemed so surreal. We were good friends in college, before he dropped out at least. Before he even told me his reason for leaving college behind, I had a hunch he wasn’t the dropping out type.  Perhaps he dressed like it, with reddish brown locks that seemed to be approaching Jesus length, or the way he reigned supreme over the kingdom of baggy shirts and even baggier jeans and sweatpants. Regardless of what his fashion sense may have communicated, he always seemed to be so put together. Matt Bragg ended up teaching me more about computer science than our professor. We used to joke that he was grown in a petri-dish and raised in some lab where all he knew was coding, or he was a robot himself so he learned binary before he learned English.

     I felt my heart beat a bit faster, a smile peeking out at the corners of my lips. That was my favorite thing about Matt. He always had this humor about him, so likeable people end up doing a double take, expecting some venomous cancellation of his previous amicable act. If he poked fun at anyone, they knew it was all in benign Bragg fun, and if he overstepped a boundary, he always seemed to know what to say when apologizing.

     I caught myself sighing, as though I had been holding my breath the whole time I had been thinking about him. At first we had only intended to meet for business, but the longer I let my mind wander, the more arrows pointed back to a desire just to see Matt again. Admittedly, I was even a bit nervous. As laidback Matt was, I didn’t want him to worry the moment he figured something was wrong. His dropout was one of unspoken honor;  one only the people unaware of the circumstances of his dropout would mock him for. Matt left college a champion of the people but an enemy of the system.

     I was afraid I’d just leave as a failure.

     Turns out, the demand for astrophysics shit is a little less generous than the nationally funded and anticipated NASA space race I was raised on. While there are the regular fanatics of private space travel companies, and NASA technically still does stuff, space has become far more irrelevant. Unless my work would somehow contribute to the discovery of a Goldilocks planet for humans, most people wouldn’t see the point if research could just go towards fixing the giant rock we’re already on. And while I understand that now, it would have been good to realize before I chose that as the sole focus of what I wanted to do when I grew up.

     I didn’t want to be just another corporate pawn making big bucks for some CEO as a little worker bee engineer. But I also didn’t want to settle for test tube-rinser and lab table-wiper. Good internships ended up wildly competitive, scholarships fluttered into the hands of people already making money on the side doing something more genius than I could imagine. Compared to the brainiacs curing cancer, or the real engineers making smart limbs for veterans, I was perfectly and utterly average, collecting debt and loans with every mundane step on campus.

     I buried my head in my hands, squeezing the tips of my fingers down onto my skull and raking up quills of black hair. How was I going to navigate this without him worrying about me? How was I ever going to convince him? Would his people ever-

     “Someone’s out past his bedtime huh?” There he was, Matt Bragg himself.

  



	2. Chapter 2

I must have been visibly startled out of my trance, because Matt’s eyes widened, lips parted as he was about to issue an apology for scaring me. I waved down his offer with a hand, gesturing for him to sit with me. I couldn’t fail this, I couldn’t turn this into a sob story. Matt deserved the objective black and white truth of my situation, not something muddled and oversaturated with some vague emotional appeal. 

“As a matter of fact Matthew, I am not out past my bedtime. Because I’m a fucking adult.” I smiled as Matt gave a small chuckle, though even as he laughed I could see it in his eyes. He was worried already, and I hadn’t even begun to describe my situation. 

“Hey, no judgement! Bedtimes are important. They kinda help guarantee I’ll actually wake up when my alarm goes off. God knows I need the time to tame this mane.” I almost laughed a little too hard at the image of what Matt’s hair must be like the moment he wakes up, my muffled it with my hand before mumbling “fucking Christ..” under my breath.  
There was a small moment of silence. Our smiles faded as we both looked out into the city lights. 

“How’s school and stuff going?” The way he asked, I could tell he already had an idea of what was going on. I want to approach this methodically, explain my dilemma with only the facts. But now, I could feel my mouth drying up and a lump forming in my throat.

“It’s… It’s going alright.” I paused, fiddling with my own fingers in my lap before grooming them through my hair. “Hasn’t been the same without you there.” 

Matt didn’t skip a beat to progress past my filler answer. His eyes softened, gazing intently like he could see deep into my soul. 

“Not to be weird, but you only do that thing with your hair when you’re stressed out.” 

Fuck. 

I brought my hands back to my lap, but the damage had already been done. I groaned and brought my hands back to my face and dragged them down, making my eyes sag and cheeks droop. 

“Okay, so it’s... it’s not going alright. I thought that, maybe if I stuck it out things would get better. Maybe there would be some skill I was missing. Maybe I would learn something revolutionary.” I felt myself choking up. I wrung my hands around my wrists avoiding my hair. I knew what was coming. I knew there was no more holding it back. And that lack of control made it all the more unbearable. 

“Matt, what the fuck am I going to do,” the raw thoughts I had swallowed down all year resurfaced with a vengeance; uncensored and straight from the soul.

“I’m practically the dumb guy at a smart guy college. I recognize that I’m intelligent or whatever, but unless I’m a super genius it seems like all I get is more shit to payoff and barely any way to pay it.” I felt my eyes well up with tears. My face was burning hot and I could feel myself beginning to sniffle to keep my nose from running. Not this, anything but this. Letting my façade of functionality fall apart hurt. But the look I knew Matt was giving me hurt my ego more than anything he could have said. 

“ All the real scholarships go to the people making fucking sentient robots! I can’t do that yet! Forgive me if I have yet to figure out what the meaning of life is when I’ve only now figured out what being an adult is supposed to feel like!” I felt myself morph from innocently venting friend into emotionally draining parasite as I blurted out the thoughts that had been haunting me. I couldn’t see through the saline cloudiness building beneath my eyelids, and I couldn’t bring myself to even look in his direction. This? This was humiliation worse than anything else I could have predicted moments prior.

Big, ugly droplets landed in my lap as I clenched my fists. Whether I was more frustrated with the situation I found myself in, or the fact that I had given my closest friend a front row seat to the most raw display of emotion I’d ever put on? That, I didn’t know. What I did know was that somehow in the course of all of that, Matt hadn’t said a word.  
My thoughts swarmed. What if he thought I was some crybaby who couldn’t wait to guilt my way into his life and mooch off his success in this gang? What if I overwhelmed him? Was he not saying anything because he didn’t know how to react?  
In the midst of my worries, I felt a hand on my shoulder. At first, I could feel the way his touch was nervous, but as he eased into putting his arm all the way around me, I found myself immediately adjusting, no, welcoming it. 

“You know,” Matt began with a slight shakiness as though he was broken up just seeing me like this, “I wanted to bring you with me, but I knew this is what you wanted more than anything.” 

I swallowed hard. Matt was right. Whether it was cheesy old sci-fi movies or real documentaries about the Space Race, I wanted so badly to be a part of finding distant planets and drifting away with the stars. And yet even on the road to get there, here I was miserable 24/7 365.  
“I would like to say follow your dreams and all that. But it seems like that clearly hasn’t been enough to get by. I’d hate to just steal you away from everything you know, but I get the sense you’re desperate for any form of change.”  
I nodded as Matt went on.

“Meet me here tonight. I’ll see how far putting a good word in gets you, and let’s go from there. Okay?” 

I wanted to argue; argue that I lacked any notable skills a gang would want, argue that I didn’t want to leave, argue that I wanted this night with Matt holding me to last forever. But admittedly, I also wanted time to recover from this catharsis. It wasn’t long before we were climbing down ladders and saying awkward yet sincere goodnights and going our separate ways once again. I hoped I would still be able to sleep what with the anxiety of knowing tomorrow could make me or break me down all over again.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic so please be gentle. <3


End file.
